Revolt against standard language: requirements for language of literature and Jan Zábrana’s stories

Abstract

Abstract The language of literary texts is a complex and multiform phenomenon. One of the problems connected with it is the employment of non-standard linguistic varieties. This paper focuses on the especial situation in Czech culture in the 1950s. In that decade, literary critics and linguists strictly required the use of Standard Czech and the restriction of non-standard varieties in literary texts. On the other hand, various inedited works were written the language of which was based on the so-called Common Czech, colloquialisms and slangs. The main part of the paper describes the language of stories by Jan Zábrana (from the years 1954 to 1957) in relation to the official requirements. Zábrana’s stories (published posthumously in the 1990s) represent a radical denying of these requirements. Zábrana depicts spontaneous and informal spoken communication that differs from the idea of cultivated standard expression. Both the figures and the narrator consistently use nonstandard linguistic means and colloquial lexicon (including vulgarisms).